FedUpUSA

Archive for the ‘Trade’ Category

Things that make you roll on the floor….

A single mysterious computer program that placed orders — and then subsequently canceled them — made up 4 percent of all quote traffic in the U.S. stock market last week, according to the top tracker of high-frequency trading activity. The motive of the algorithm is still unclear.

Oh really?  The motive is unclear eh?

No it’s not.

The motive is to try to goad someone else into placing an order against the fake orders that are never intended to execute.  This, incidentally, is illegal — the Securities Act makes unlawful any action taken in the market with the intent to distort prices.  In other words the placement of any order into the market for any purpose other than to have it executed is against the law.

Translation: The ultimate goal of many of these programs is to gum up the system so it slows down the quote feed to others and allows the computer traders (with their co-located servers at the exchanges) to gain a money-making arbitrage opportunity.

That’s a crime; intentional disruption of the markets is illegal.

“I feel a tax on order-stuffing is what the markets need at this point,” said David Greenberg of Greenberg Capital. “This will cut down on the number of erroneous bids and offers placed into the market at any given time and should help stabilize the trading environment.”

Tax?  Naw.

It’s much simpler to fix this, as I’ve noted before.

All orders must be valid until executed or 2 (two) full seconds have elapsed.

That’s it.  That’s all you have to do.  This change instantly makes this sort of game unprofitable and it ends instantly.  It makes all orders comply with the law; any order you place is exposed to execution risk against every other person in the marketplace.  That’s what the law says, and a literal one-line change in regulation would put that in place.

Why hasn’t it been done?

Because the markets are not for you, nor are they for honest companies.  They have been stolen by the Wall Street bandits and now are used as a tool to screw you and everyone else.

Period.

For decades our politicians have promised us that the “free trade” agenda would bring us greater prosperity than ever before.  They insisted that merging our economy into the emerging one world economy would cause millions upon millions of new jobs to be added to the U.S. economy.  Unfortunately, it was all a giant lie.  Trading with other countries is not a bad thing as long as the level of trade is fairly equal on both sides.  When trade becomes very unequal, the consequences can be absolutely catastrophic.  Since 1975, the United States has bought more than 8 trillion dollars more stuff from the rest of the world than they have bought from us.  We are the only economy on earth that could have had 8 trillion dollars drained out of it and still be standing.  Instead of leaving the country, those 8 trillion dollars could have gone to U.S. businesses and U.S. workers.  If we could go back and have a “do over”, how much more prosperous would we be today if we had kept that 8 trillion dollars inside the country?

But instead of pursuing a balanced trade philosophy, our politicians were so enamored with the emerging one world economy that they threw all caution to the wind.

So we have lost tens of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of our national wealth.

And this emerging one world economy is absolutely killing American workers.  It lumps them into a global labor pool with workers in other countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.

Just think of it this way.  Imagine that you are a giant corporation that makes “widgets”.  You can make them in the United States, but you would have to pay your workers about $10 an hour, provide them with a whole bunch of benefits, pay very high taxes, and comply with a dizzying array of laws, rules and regulations.

Or, you could set up shop on the other side of the world where you could pay your workers a dollar an hour.  Those workers would receive no benefits and you would have to deal with very little red tape.

Which would you choose?

The “giant sucking sound” that Ross Perot once warned us about has become a reality.  Big employers are competing with one another to see who can outsource jobs the fastest, and American workers are the big losers in all of this.

As I wrote about the other day, right now there are some American workers that are actually personally training their replacements from overseas how to do their jobs.

If nothing is done about this, jobs are going to continue to pour out of high wage countries such as the United States and into low wage countries on the other side of the globe, and big corporations are going to keep laughing all the way to the bank as unemployment in America gets even worse.

The following are 22 stats that show how the emerging one world economy is absolutely killing American workers….

#1 One professor has estimated that cutting the U.S. trade deficit in half would create 5 million more jobs in the United States.

#2 The United States has a trade imbalance that is more than 7 times larger than any other nation on earth has.

#3 Overall, the United States has run a trade deficit of more than 8 trillion dollars with the rest of the globe since 1975.  That 8 trillion dollars could have gone to support U.S. businesses and pay the wages of U.S. workers.  Federal, state and local taxes would have been paid on that 8 trillion dollars if it had stayed in the United States.  This is one reason why our national debt is getting ready to cross the 16 trillion dollar mark.

#4 When NAFTA was passed in 1993, the United States had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars.  In 2010, we had a trade deficit with Mexico of 61.6 billion dollars.

#5 In 2001, American consumers spent 102 billion dollars on products made in China.  In 2011, American consumers spent 399 billion dollars on products made in China.

#6 The Chinese undervalue their currency by about 40 percent in order to gain a critical advantage over foreign competitors.  This means that many Chinese companies are able to absolutely thrive while their competition in the United States goes out of business.  The following is from a recent Fox News article….

To keep Chinese products artificially inexpensive on US store shelves, Beijing undervalues the yuan by 40 percent. It pirates US technology, subsidizes exports and imposes high tariffs on imports.

#7 According to the New York Times, a Jeep Grand Cherokee that costs $27,490 in the United States costs about $85,000 in China thanks to all the tariffs.

#8 The U.S. trade deficit with China during 2011 was 295.4 billion dollars.  That was the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.

#9 Back in 1985, our trade deficit with China was only about 6 million dollars (million with an “m”) for the entire year.

#10 U.S. consumers spend about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that Chinese consumers spend on goods and services from the United States.

#11 The United States has actually lost an average of about 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

#12 According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing about half a million jobs to China every single year.

#13 The United States has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.

#14 During 2010 alone, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities closed their doors in America every single day.

#15 Since the auto industry bailout, approximately 70 percent of all GM vehicles have been built outside the United States.

#16 As I have written about previously, 95 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were middle class jobs.

#17 According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue.

#18 The percentage of working age Americans that are employed right now is actually smaller than it was at the end of the last recession.

#19 The average duration of unemployment in the United States is nearly three times as long as it was back in the year 2000.

#20 Due in part to the globalization of the labor pool, only about 24 percent of all jobs in the United States are “good jobs” at this point.

#21 Without enough good jobs, more Americans than ever before are falling into poverty.  Today, more than 100 million Americans are on welfare.

#22 In recent years the U.S. economy has embraced “free trade” and the emerging one world economy like never before.  Instead of increasing the number of jobs in our economy, it has resulted in the worst stretch of job creation in the United States in modern history….

If any single number captures the state of the American economy over the last decade, it is zero. That was the net gain in jobs between 1999 and 2009—nada, nil, zip. By painful contrast, from the 1940s through the 1990s, recessions came and went, but no decade ended without at least a 20 percent increase in the number of jobs.

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

You can get a really good idea of how nightmarish the manufacturing job losses have been in the United States over the past 40 years by checking out this map right here.

And if everything posted above was not bad enough, some U.S. companies even find themselves competing with slave labor here in the United States.

Seriously.

Prison labor is absolutely destroying some businesses here in America.  The following comes from a recent CNN article….

Unicor is a government-run enterprise that employs over 13,000 inmates — at wages as low as 23 cents an hour — to make goods for the Pentagon and other federal agencies.

With some exceptions, Unicor gets first dibs on federal contracts over private companies as long as its bid is comparable in price, quantity and delivery. In other words: If Unicor wants a contract, it gets it.

One company that tries to compete with Unicor has been forced to lay off 150 people over the years because they lose so many contracts to them….

Wilson has been competing with Unicor for 20 years. He’s an executive at American Apparel Inc., an Alabama company that makes military uniforms. (It is not affiliated with the international retailer of the same name.) He has gone head-to-head with Unicor on just about every product his company makes — and said he has laid off 150 people over the years as a result.

“We pay employees $9 on average,” Wilson said. “They get full medical insurance, 401(k) plans and paid vacation. Yet we’re competing against a federal program that doesn’t pay any of that.”

But this is also the kind of thing that U.S. companies are dealing with when they try to compete with big corporations that are exploiting cheap labor abroad.

If you are spending ten times as much on labor as your competitor is, it is going to be really hard to survive.

That is why it has become so hard to find products that are made in America.

Most of our jobs these days are low paying “service jobs”, cushy government jobs or jobs where people push papers around all day.

But those kinds of jobs do not create lasting wealth for a country.

Did you know that there are more tax preparers in the United States than there are police officers and firefighters combined?

Our economy is a giant mirage.  We consume way more wealth than we produce, but we are able to keep the party going because we are riding the biggest debt spiral the world has ever seen.

But at some point the debt spiral is going to end and the crash is going to come.

Until then, however, those at the very top are still really enjoying themselves.

For example, one of the latest trends is for rich kids to show off pictures of themselves enjoying their enormous wealth on Instagram.

Something has gone very, very wrong with this country.

So what do you think about all this?  Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below….

The Economic Collapse

Did you know that we buy about a half a trillion dollars more stuff from the rest of the world than they buy from us?  The U.S. balance of trade is not only mind-blowingly bad – it is the worst in the world.  It is being projected that the U.S. trade deficit for 2011 will be 558.2 billion dollars.  That would be an increase of more than 11 percent from last year.  As I have written about previously, the United States is the worst in the world at a lot of things, but as far as the economic well-being of our nation is concerned, our balance of trade is particularly important.  Every single month, far more money goes out of this country than comes into it.  Tax revenues are significantly reduced as all of this money gets sucked out of our communities.  The federal government, state governments and local governments borrow gigantic piles of money to try to make up the difference, but all of this borrowing just makes our debt problems a whole lot worse.  In the end, no amount of government debt is going to be able to cover over the fact that our national economic pie is shrinking.  We are continually consuming far more wealth than we produce, and that is a recipe for economic disaster.

The “current account balance” is one key indicator of how a country is doing economically.  The following is how the CIA World Factbook defines “current account balance”….

This entry records a country’s net trade in goods and services, plus net earnings from rents, interest, profits, and dividends, and net transfer payments (such as pension funds and worker remittances) to and from the rest of the world during the period specified.

If someone were to ask you what countries in the world have strong, thriving economies right now, what countries would you think of?

Would countries like China, Germany, Russia and Saudi Arabia come to mind?

Well, all of those nations have huge positive current account balances.  In fact, China has the best current account balance in the world at +$305 billion.

So who is on the other end of the scale?

The following information comes directly from a CIA World Factbook chart….

190 Turkey $ -48,420,000,000

191 Canada $ -48,500,000,000

192 India $ -51,780,000,000

193 France $ -54,400,000,000

194 United Kingdom $ -56,190,000,000

195 Spain $ -63,650,000,000

196 Italy $ -67,940,000,000

197 United States $ -470,200,000,000

The United States is rated dead last at number 197.

Just take a close look at those numbers for a minute.

The U.S. had a current account balance of negative 470 billion dollars in 2010.  That figure was almost 7 times worse than the next worst country (Italy).

Not only does the United States have the worst current account balance in the entire world, the truth is that no other country is even in the same ballpark as us.

We are bleeding wealth so fast that it is hard to even describe it.

But perhaps a real life example can help put this all into perspective.

One 22-year-old Saudi Arabian student has a collection of sports cars that is worth more than 12 million dollars.  Reportedly, his collection includes at least three Lamborghinis, five Ferraris and five Porsches.

And guess who paid for it?

You did.

Every month, billions of dollars go out of the United States to help pay for the insane lifestyles of the ultra-wealthy oil barons of the Middle East.

Meanwhile, dozens of major U.S. cities are degenerating into hellholes.

Once upon a time, Detroit was one of the greatest industrial cities that the world has ever seen.  It was the envy of the entire globe.

But now Detroit is an utter nightmare….

*An analysis of census figures found that 48.5% of all men living in Detroit from age 20 to age 64 did not have a job in 2008.

*If you can believe it, the median price of a home in Detroit is now just $6000.

*Only 25 percent of students in Detroit graduate from high school.

So what happened to Detroit?

Well, just as has been happening in so many other U.S. cities, industry has been leaving at an astounding pace.

As I have written about previously, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities a day were shut down in the United States during 2010.

Overall, the U.S. has lost a total of more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.

This country is bleeding middle class jobs profusely, and neither major political party seems to care.

American family budgets are being stretched tighter and tighter these days.  There are not nearly enough good jobs to go around and yet the cost of everything just seems to keep going up.

Many families are going into massive amounts of debt in an attempt to make ends meet.  According to a recent CNN article, credit card use in the United States is experiencing a major upswing once again….

Purchases made with credit cards rose 8.2% in the first quarter of 2011, 9% in the second quarter and 10.6% in the third quarter, according to First Data.

Of course American consumers were out in force on Black Friday once again this year.  They gleefully filled up their carts with cheap plastic crap made overseas, and many racked up huge credit card balances in the process.

But most of us never stop to think about those that make all of these cheap plastic products for us.

Thanks to the globalization of the economy, big corporations and corrupt governments can make stuff in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages and then ship their products into the United States for free.

It is important for all of us to learn what actually happens to these people that are working so hard for slave labor wages.  The following comes from a recent article in the Guardian….

At the Hung Hing factory the researcher found that the 8,000 workers put in up to 100 hours of overtime a month, far in excess of the legal maximum. Workers say they have to sign a document agreeing to work additional overtime on top of the legal maximum. The basic wage was £132 a month (up to £250 with maximum overtime payments) but wages were paid up to three weeks late.

Workers complained of inadequate training with the factory machines and last year one worker died when he fell into a machine. They said there were frequent injuries and concerns over the chemicals used. There were also complaints about the standard of the dormitories, where water for washing and flushing toilets is turned off at 10pm.

How in the world are American workers supposed to “compete” for jobs at those wage levels?

As I have written about previously, Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University is warning that 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if nothing is done to stop this.

But instead, our “representatives” in Congress just keep pushing more “free trade” agreements as the answer to our problems.  Congress has passed new free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama, and the Obama administration has made “the NAFTA of the Pacific” a very high priority.

Well, if “free trade” is supposed to create so many jobs, then why was last decade the worst decade for the creation of jobs since the Great Depression?

If you can believe it, zero jobs were created between 1999 and 2009.  The following comes from an article in Washington Monthly….

“If any single number captures the state of the American economy over the last decade, it is zero. That was the net gain in jobs between 1999 and 2009—nada, nil, zip. By painful contrast, from the 1940s through the 1990s, recessions came and went, but no decade ended without at least a 20 percent increase in the number of jobs.”

But our leaders don’t care about us.  In fact, even the members of Obama’s “jobs panel” have been shipping jobs out of the United States at a very rapid pace.

The U.S. has run a negative balance of trade with the rest of the globe every single year since 1976.  During that time, the U.S. has run up a total trade deficit of more than 7.5 trillion dollars with the rest of the planet.

That 7.5 trillion dollars could have gone to support U.S. workers and U.S. businesses.

But it didn’t.  Instead, it went out of the country and it made foreigners wealthier as our own cities slowly rotted.

Now we are actually passing laws that encourage wealthy foreigners to come in and buy up pieces of the United States.

For example, there is actually a bill in Congress that would automatically give residence visas to any foreigners that are willing to spend at least half a million dollars to buy houses inside the United States.

The idea behind the bill is that this will get the housing market moving again.

There aren’t enough Americans with good jobs to buy houses, so we have now decided to beg foreigners to buy them.

How bizarre is that?

Until our horrendous balance of trade is fixed, the employment situation in this country is going to continue to get worse.

Any politician that tries to sell you on a “jobs plan” that does not address our balance of trade is either totally incompetent or is straight out lying to you.

The economic infrastructure of America is crumbling a little bit more every single day.  If something dramatic is not done, we will continue to bleed businesses, bleed jobs and bleed wealth.

Please share this information with as many people as you can.  The American people need to understand what is happening to the economy.  We need to work to wake up as many people as we can before it is too late.

The Economic Collapse

It is absolutely amazing how many Americans are still convinced that more “free trade” is the answer to our economic problems.  The truth is that there is a vast difference between “free trade” and “fair trade”, and in this article I will prove that all true conservatives and all true liberals should be completely against the insane trade policies of the federal government.  Yes, we will always need to trade with other nations.  Other nations make or have things that we need to trade for.  Balanced trade relationships with other nations that have similar economies and that share similar values can be very beneficial.  For example, our trading relationship with Canada, though not perfect, is generally beneficial to both sides.  However, the United States also has dozens of trading relationships that are highly destructive to the U.S. economy.  There are some predatory nations that are blatantly and openly cheating and everyone can see it.  They are getting away with bloody murder and they are robbing us blind.  The United States of America is being taken advantage of, and as a result thousands of good businesses are being destroyed and millions of good jobs are being lost.  If you are an American and you are in favor of all of the unfair trade that is currently going on, then either you don’t know much about economics or you actually want to see the U.S. economy be destroyed.

Congress has just passed new free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama.  The Obama administration has also made “the NAFTA of the Pacific” a very high priority.

Obama says that all of these new trade pacts will create more U.S. jobs.

Well, either Barack Obama is completely ignorant when it comes to economics or else he is lying.

When we merge our economy with the economies of nations where wages are much lower, it is inevitable that large numbers of jobs are going to leave the high wage areas (where we live) and go to areas where wages are much lower.

It also certainly does not help that we have the highest corporate tax rate in the world, that we burden our businesses with mountains of ridiculous regulations,  and that we allow our “trade partners” to give their businesses a huge advantage by openly subsidizing them.

The way that the system is set up now, nearly all U.S. businesses are at a massive, massive disadvantage.  In general, the only businesses that can compete effectively in this environment are the giant corporations that can offshore huge portions of their operations.

If you are a conservative, then there is no way that you should support our current trade policies.  If you are a liberal, then there is no way that you should support our current trade policies.

However, if you are a “George W. Bush Republican” or a “Clinton/Obama Democrat” that believes in globalism and the establishment of a one world economy as part of a “New World Order”, then it would make sense why you would want to see America deindustrialized and brought down to the level of the rest of the world.

But if you are a true conservative or a true liberal, then the following are reasons why you should be horrified by our current trade policies….

#1 Other Nations Openly Manipulate Their Currencies In Order To Gain A Significant Competitive Advantage

For example, China keeps its currency set at a super low level relative to the U.S. dollar.  By doing this, their products are far cheaper than U.S. products, and U.S. businesses cannot compete with them.  This has resulted in the death of large numbers of U.S. businesses and the loss of millions of U.S. jobs.

So just how bad is this problem?  Well, a recent CNN article stated the following….

Critics of China’s policy estimate that the yuan is still undervalued by 25% to 40%, even with the recent rises in value.

The other day the U.S. Senate passed a bill that would impose tariffs on currency manipulators, and China has already retaliated, even though the bill has not become law yet and even though it almost certainly won’t.

China plays hardball.  They love the advantage that they are getting right now and they do not plan on losing it.

#2 Millions Of Good Paying Jobs Have Been Shipped Overseas And They Are Never Coming Back

Our politicians all try to tell us how good they are at creating jobs.

But what is the truth?

The truth is that a total of zero jobs were created last decade.  The following is a quote from a recent article in Washington Monthly….

“If any single number captures the state of the American economy over the last decade, it is zero. That was the net gain in jobs between 1999 and 2009—nada, nil, zip. By painful contrast, from the 1940s through the 1990s, recessions came and went, but no decade ended without at least a 20 percent increase in the number of jobs.”

Last decade we opened up our trade with the rest of the world more than ever before.  But instead of creating jobs it destroyed them.  Our trade deficits exploded and unemployment skyrocketed.

The Economic Policy Institute says that since 2001 America has lost approximately 2.8 million jobs due to our trade deficit with China alone.

So if you are unemployed, that is probably what happened to the job you are supposed to have.

It went overseas and it is not coming back.

#3 America Is Being Deindustrialized At A Blistering Pace Thanks To Globalism

The advocates of “free trade” cannot dispute the cold, hard facts….

*The United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

*The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.

*If you can believe it, more than 42,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have been closed down since 2001.

*Between December 2000 and December 2010, 38 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Ohio were lost, 42 percent of the manufacturing jobs in North Carolina were lost and 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Michigan were lost.

*Back in 1970, 25 percent of all jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only 9 percent of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs.

#4 (For Conservatives) True Conservatives Should Be Horrified That We Are Being Taken Advantage Of By A Hardcore Communist Nation That Hates Us

Ronald Reagan would have never engaged in “free trade” with the Soviet Union.  The Communist Party is in complete control of China and while we may regard China as a “frenemy”, they really do believe that they will totally defeat us someday.  If you doubt this, just read what the top generals and politicians in China are writing.

It is so incredibly stupid what we are doing.  Our trade relationship with China has enabled the largest communist economy in the world to go from third world status to superpower status.  China is now the second largest economy in the world, and that would have never happened without our help.

A lot of people like to talk about how “capitalist” China is becoming, but the truth is that they have never wavered from their pure belief in communism.  7 of the 10 largest corporations in China are owned by the government.

A host of other corporations in China are very deeply subsidized by the government.

U.S. businesses have a very hard time competing with foreign businesses that are deeply subsidized by their own national governments.

It is called cheating, and we let other countries get away with it.

So our businesses die and their products fill up our store shelves.

#5 We Are Endangering Our National Security By Greatly Enriching Our Biggest Potential Enemies

The biggest threats to the United States are not some goat herders hiding out in the caves of Afghanistan.

The biggest threats to the United States are actually China and Russia.

Conservatives are supposed to be the ones that are so concerned about national security.  But instead of expressing concerns about China, they just keep pushing for more free trade.

As a result, China has been able to become a true global military superpower.

Someday we will deeply, deeply regret that.

#6 China Brazenly Steals Technology From Anyone And Everyone That They Can

China gets away with bloody murder when it comes to stealing technology.  They will do it “legally” if they can, and they will do it in “other ways” if they have to.

At this point, China has invented a whole host of ways to extract technology from any firms that wants to do business in China.

The following is a short excerpt from a recent article on CNN….

Foreign companies are often required to set-up joint ventures with Chinese firms before the can start doing business there. And China is instituting new “indigenous innovation” rules that U.S. companies say force them to transfer their own technology to their Chinese partners.

#7 We Should Never Trade With Any Nation That Has A “One Child” Policy

China has a very strict “one child policy” which should be absolutely abhorrent to all Americans.

Most Americans have no idea what is really going on over in China.  The following is from a recent article in the Epoch Times….

Pregnant women lacking birth permits are hunted down like criminals by population planning police in China and forcibly aborted.

All over China, mobile abortion vans are used to help enforce the one child policy.  What women in China must endure is absolutely sickening, and this kind of behavior should never be accepted in the global community.

But instead of penalizing China, we reward them for this behavior.  They even get awards at the United Nations for it.

Look, conservatives are supposed to be pro-life.  If you are a social conservative, then it goes against everything that you believe to support trade with China.

You can support trade with China if you want, but then don’t even try to call yourself “pro-life” again.

We should never trade with any nation that has a “one child policy”.  Such a policy is against everything that America is supposed to stand for.

#8 Our Horrendous Trade Imbalance Has Allowed Other Nations To Accumulate Gigantic Amounts Of Our Debt

Every month, we send much more money to the rest of the world than they send to us.  One thing that those other nations are doing with all of that money is that they are buying up our debt.

Our trade deficit with China has enabled them to accumulate nearly a trillion dollars of our debt.  This gives them tremendous leverage over us and is a very serious threat to our economy and to our national security.

So now China can threaten the stability of our financial system with just a phone call.

#9 Globalist Trade Institutions Are A Serious Threat To Our National Sovereignty

Today, the “global economy” is governed by globalist institutions such as the G20, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank.  The United States has given up huge amounts of national sovereignty to these organizations.

If you are a true conservative, this should greatly disturb you.

We don’t want faceless international bureaucrats telling us what our trade policies will be.  But to a large degree that is the situation that we have gotten ourselves into.

#10 Liberals (And All Americans) Are Supposed To Care About What Is Best For American Workers

Millions of working class jobs have been shipped overseas, and yet Barack Obama just keeps pushing for more “free trade” agreements which will make the problem even worse.

But instead of screaming bloody murder, liberals keep on supporting Obama.

It’s disgusting.

The truth is that the Obama administration actually says that there are certain kinds of jobs that we “don’t want” in the United States.

For example, the following is what U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk recently told Tim Robertson of the Huffington Post about the Obama administration’s attitude toward keeping manufacturing jobs in America….

Let’s increase our competitiveness… the reality is about half of our imports, our trade deficit is because of how much oil [we import], so you take that out of the equation, you look at what percentage of it are things that frankly, we don’t want to make in America, you know, cheaper products, low-skill jobs that frankly college kids that are graduating from, you know, UC Cal and Hastings [don't want], but what we do want is to capture those next generation jobs and build on our investments in our young people, our education infrastructure.

So where is the outrage?

Is anyone even awake out there?

Even the construction of many of our roads and bridges is being outsourced to China.  Just check out the following quote from a recent ABC News article….

In New York there is a $400 million renovation project on the Alexander Hamilton Bridge.

In California, there is a $7.2 billion project to rebuild the Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco and Oakland.

In Alaska, there is a proposal for a $190 million bridge project.

These projects sound like steps in the right direction, but much of the work is going to Chinese government-owned firms.

“When we subsidize jobs in China, we’re not creating any wealth in the United States,” said Scott Paul, executive director for the Alliance for American Manufacturing.

Liberals are supposed to be working to defend the working class.

So why won’t they openly go after Obama on these issues?

Our unfair trade agreements have put American workers in direct competition for jobs with the cheapest labor on the globe.

Until this is fixed, you will continue to hear a “great sucking sound” as millions of jobs continue to leave the United States and go to places where labor is ten to twenty times cheaper.

It is insanity what we are doing.  We allow big corporations to send their manufacturing offshore and also to ship their products back into the United States for free.

Where in that equation is good news for the American worker?

#11 Liberals (And All Americans) Should Be Horrified By The Exploitation Of Slave Labor Around The Globe

All over the globe, workers toil in nightmarish conditions for slave labor pay just so that Americans can feed their addiction for cheap foreign products.

Big corporations and collectivist governments such as China are getting unbelievably rich by exploiting this slave labor pool.

Get educated about this and find out the truth.  It just might totally change the way that you view “free trade”.

#12 Liberals (And All Americans) Should Be Horrified By The Damage To The Environment Our Trade Relationships Cause

Liberals are supposed to deeply care about the environment.  But our trade relationship with nations on the other side of the globe result in thousands of factories and businesses leaving our shores and ending up in countries where the environmental regulations are not nearly as strict.  In fact, nations such as China are a complete and total environmental nightmare at this point.  If liberals truly cared about the environment they would want to keep factories and businesses here.

#13 Very Dangerous Products Continue To Flood Into This Country From Overseas

Isn’t product safety supposed to be a big thing for liberals?  Today, a huge percentage of the products we buy are made outside the United States far from the watchful eyes of our regulatory agencies.  Over the past couple of years, there has been headline after headline about dangerous products made in China.  The following is just one example of this: 10 Babies Die Mysteriously At Fort Bragg: Toxic Drywall From China Used In Base Homes The Culprit?

#14 The Globalization Of The Economy Causes Income Inequality To Grow

By paying slave labor wages to workers overseas, the big corporations are becoming very wealthy.  At the same time, that means that there are much fewer jobs for average working class Americans, and wages for the jobs that remain are pushed down because of increased competition for jobs.

So the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

If you don’t believe that income inequality in the United States has become a huge problem, just check out this chart.

#15 Because Of All Of The Cheating And All Of The Predatory Behavior That Is Going On, Our Trade Relationships Have Become Incredibly Imbalanced

Today, the United States spends about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.

So how is that even close to “fair”?

Our store shelves are absolutely packed with stuff from China.

In 2010, the number one U.S. export to China was “scrap and trash”.

Even in high technology products we are being destroyed.  In 2002, the United States had a trade deficit in “advanced technology products” of $16 billion with the rest of the world.  In 2010, that number skyrocketed to $82 billion.

#16 Our Gigantic Trade Deficit Is Destroying Our National Wealth

The United States has had a negative trade balance every single year since 1976, and since that time the United States has run a total trade deficit of more than 7.5 trillion dollars with the rest of the world.

Our gigantic trade deficits are making us poorer as a nation each and every month.  Each year, somewhere around half a trillion dollars of our national wealth gets transferred out of the United States.  That half a trillion dollars could be going to support U.S. businesses and U.S. jobs.  Taxes could be paid on that half a trillion dollars.  But instead it leaves the country and makes other nations wealthier.

#17 The Globalization Of The Economy Has Caused Unemployment In The United States To Explode

If you gathered together all of the workers that are “officially” unemployed in the United States today, they would constitute the 68th largest country in the world.

#18 As Our Cities Are Deindustrialized, Many Of Them Are Being Transformed Into Absolute Hellholes

The other day, I wrote the following about what is happening in cities and towns across the United States….

All across America there are cities and towns that were once prosperous and beautiful that are being transformed into absolute hellholes.  The scars left by the long-term economic decline of the United States are getting deeper and more gruesome.

#19 Without Good Jobs, An Increasing Number Of Americans Are Having To Turn To Government Assistance

We are going to support U.S. workers one way or another.  Either we are going to provide them with good jobs, or we are going to let their jobs be shipped out of the country and we are going to pay for the government to feed and house them.

Today, there are more than 45 million Americans on food stamps.  That number has gone up by more than 70 percent since 2007.  Almost every single month we set a new all-time record for the number of people being fed by the federal government.

#20 If Nothing Is Done, All Of This Is Going To Get A Lot Worse

According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades.

Can you imagine what America is going to look like if that happens?

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Okay, so in light of all of that information, can anyone out there defend the current “free trade” policies of the federal government?

The Economic Collapse